


Glass Marbles

by Scribbleness



Category: Final Fantasy VII Remake (Video Game 2020)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:35:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28262490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scribbleness/pseuds/Scribbleness
Summary: It was the glass marble that started it all, the same one that brought her to him. And now it had worked its own magic and brought him back to her.
Relationships: Tifa Lockhart/Cloud Strife
Comments: 9
Kudos: 27





	Glass Marbles

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Prar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prar/gifts).



> This is a CloTi Secret Santa gift with a very interesting prompt "glass marbles in the sea." I am just so glad that Prar loves it. I hope you will enjoy it, too! Happy Holidays!

The glow of the green materia was borderline glaring amidst the dim light of the laboratory that Tifa had to squint every time she looked up from her clipboard and back to the crystal orb inside the glass canister. She had been matching the hypothetical reactions of elemental energy inside the materia and how much more upgrades one can take, something that would be apparently helpful in Shinra’s development of more powerful materias. They were already on materia number twenty-one in their weeks of endless testing, observing, and then failing. She wondered how this one would be different— if it would be any different. She supposed that was why she was there in the first place.

She shut her eyes tightly when they were back on the clipboard, squeezing them to massage the strain out. It was worse than staring on the computer screen, but still better than sitting on her desk all day. She returned to the materia.

Glass marbles. Glorified glowing glass marbles were what the materias were, only bigger, powerful, and actually useful. Her shoulders drooped as her mind wandered at the affinity, and the coincidence of finding herself in that moment musing about it. Glass marbles she used to collect when she was a kid along the beaches of Costa Del Sol during the summer days. Trinkets of vacations from her childhood, her lucky charms.

“It’s not gonna answer things by itself if you just keep staring.”

Tifa jumped, her shoulders stiffening back up. “Sorry, Doc Valentine.”

Doctor Valentine made a displeased hum in his throat. “Anything so far?”

Tifa paid him a brief and bumbling glance. “No, Sir.”

“Then place it back into the chamber.”

“Yes, Doc.”

Lunch break barely spared her from more stress and strain an hour later when she found herself hungry and lightheaded from having too little sugar in her system. Still, she was more than capable of walking to the Human Resources Department even if it was three floors down from the office cafeteria.

Her conspirator, an HR Officer named Nell, was only about to gather her things for her break when she looked up at Tifa, her heels tapping against the floor inside the now desolate office being an indication of her arrival.

Tifa’s face brightened into a smile. “Nell!”

Nell stretched her lips to her sides before forcing a smile. She already knew what Tifa was there for. “Tifa, hey.”

Tifa stopped in front of her and rocked on her soles. “So!”

“So.”

“You know, anything new?”

Nell curved down the side of her mouth and shook her head. “Sorry, Tifa. Still no opening for the SOLDIER Program.”

Tifa maintained her smile and nodded slowly. “Oh. Okay. Well, let me know if—”

“Yeah. I’ll email you,” Nell replied hurriedly as she adjusted the strap of her tote bag around her shoulder. “Sorry, Tifa. The girls are waiting for me. I gotta go.”

Tifa nodded once more. “Yeah.”

She sat alone on her table, ten minutes later in the cafeteria, an everyday ritual she had suited herself into as she took all the time for herself, her lunch, her second coffee, and her book. One hour was all anyone was ever given and one hour was all she needed to catch her breath. She flipped through the pages of her book, something she bought at an absurdly cheap price about the disciplines of the martial arts. She found it a tad too boring without actual practice, but her mentor Zangan had insisted that she commit everything in the book to her heart and memory. Which she was attempting to do, albeit a little slowly.

Tifa inhaled deeply, unconsciously curling her fingers around the green glass marble pendant she was wearing around her neck. It looked so much like the materia she had been staring at everyday for hours on end. Funny, she thought, how she believed it to be responsible for bringing her there at Shinra. She was told that lucky charms were never real and that it was her grit and skills that led her to become one of the giant company’s scientists. She would heavily account inspiration, however. Maybe.

* * *

The first time she ever learned of hunting glass marbles by the shores was when she was seven years old. Her parents had just made some solid acquaintance with the Strife family after their patriarch passed away. Her mother made sure that Mrs. Strife was in constant company as she and her son mourned over their loss. Tifa was never obligated to befriend the son and she only ever knew of his name when both families went to Costa Del Sol one summer. And the first things she noticed about him were his blue eyes. She remembered thinking they were as blue as the sunny sky, something he inherited from Mrs. Strife.

“Do not stray too far to the water!” her mother called sternly behind her when she began to run to the shore. She knew what that meant— that she was only allowed to dip into the water up to her ankles and was never allowed to venture any deeper unless her father was swimming with her. It wouldn’t take long, she thought, because her father loved swimming.

Mrs. Strife’s son, a scrawny boy her age with strikingly spiky blond hair, approached her with something in his hands. His head was lowered, lips pressed together tightly, and his eyebrows creased to the middle. She knew he wanted to say something and was too shy to do so. She learned later on that talking was not one of his strengths.

So she figured she might as well do the talking first. “What’s your name?”

His face relaxed and his eyes rounded when he looked up at her. “Huh?”

Tifa giggled. “I’m Tifa. What’s yours?”

“I’m… uh…” He began rubbing the back of his neck. The boy was painfully shy. “Cloud.”

She widened her eyes. “Cloud! Wow!” She pointed at the wide blue cloudy sky that stretched to the horizons of the sea, unhindered by the houses and buildings like the ones in Nibelheim. “Like that!”

Cloud nodded. “Yeah.”

Tifa’s eyes fell on his hands. “What do you have there?”

“Oh, uh…” Cloud lifted his hands and opened them, unveiling small bright tourmaline balls. “Glass marbles.”

Tifa marveled at the marbles, never seeing anything like them up until that moment. She lifted a finger and brushed one of the glass marbles in his hand. “They’re so beautiful! Where did you get them?”

Cloud pointed at a spot behind him. “Over there. Found them the second we got here.” He lowered his head again. “Uhm…”

Tifa looked up at him and tilted her head, curious at his sudden change of manner. “Hm?”

“Do you wanna find more marbles?”

Tifa nodded. “Yeah!” 

Cloud led her to the shore where the water waved just enough to whisk by their feet. They both knelt on the sand as they sifted and dug through it until they could feel the heat of the sun burning on their backs and the soreness on their legs and knees. 

Tifa stood and huffed. “I think I’m done looking here.”

Cloud followed and nodded. “Wanna go look somewhere else?”

“Yeah. Maybe later.” Tifa beamed at Cloud. “We should go back to our parents.”

“Yeah. Do you wanna?”

Tifa dusted the sand off her shorts. “We got potato chips and juice. Wanna eat?”

Cloud seemed unsure at first before he reached into his pockets and showed her the marbles from earlier. “Here.”  
Tifa raised an eyebrow. “Huh?”

Cloud shook the marbles in his hand. “Take them.”

“Why?”

“I… already have a lot of these at home. So…”

Tifa straightened up, her eyes still on Cloud’s hunted treasures. “Are you sure? You found them, so you gotta keep them.”

“I…” His cheeks turned pink. “I want you to have them.”

Tifa shifted her eyes from his hand up to his eyes. Cloud did the same and caught her in his sight, so she smiled.

And it was a smile he would never forget.

He held on to that smile until the next day and found Tifa already along the shores, scanning through the fringe while her father stood by. He waved at Cloud lazily to join them.

“She said she needs to look for more glass marbles,” her father said, rubbing his eyes then folding his arms back against his chest. 

Tifa jumped on her feet and whirled around to Cloud. She giggled and held up a glass marble, still wet and rough from the sand. “Look! I found one earlier!”

Cloud nodded and smiled. “Good job, Tifa!”

“I’m going to collect them. Like you!”

Cloud cast his head down to hide his blush.

* * *

It grew into a tradition for them over the years— their families going to a beach every summer where Tifa and Cloud would look for glass marbles. Both of them had grown taller than the shallow depths of the shore and stronger than the waves that grazed their ankles as the water hit them. The hunt for glass marbles had also become more adventurous as they searched through the bed of sand underneath the water, something they could already do as long as they had each other whilst they did.

Cloud had taught Tifa to buy a fishbowl where she could keep all the glass marbles they had gathered in their vacations. As their numbers grew, so did their friendship which was made easier by their close proximity as neighbors— it was either Tifa who would come over to the Strife household, or Cloud dropping by the Lockharts’ and staying over every Saturday, playing video games, watching movies or their favorite shows, and then talking afterwards about school, gossips, and the future they had envisioned for themselves. And then, everytime summer approached, they would find their conversations steering back to where it all started— the glass marbles. Cloud called them his amulets while Tifa simply called them her lucky charms. And it would not be long before they put whatever spell those glass marbles had to the test.

It was during their later years in Nibelheim, one day when Tifa was only a month shy from her fifteenth birthday, when she noticed a change in Cloud— that his voice had gone deeper. It was perhaps with this revelation that she had discerned a change in her, too. She blamed the hormones that came with their puberty, an embarrassing knowledge they learned from school, but there was something in the way Cloud talked to her in his new voice that would stir something in her chest each time. And then she had also begun to acknowledge that his blue eyes were becoming more hard-edged with experience and time which had made her start to feel truly uneasy and awkward around him, especially when he was being more attentive towards her.

During one of the nights, a Saturday when he would usually ask her to watch a television series they had been following, Tifa refused to allow him to stay over for the first time.

“Why not?” he asked her. She remembered how his demeanour suddenly changed from excited to shock as he turned his head from the television to her. It was the first moment she took a better look at his eyes, his nose, his jaws, his lips, his hair, and how they all came perfectly together like a master’s sculpture.

“Uhm…” she trailed off, lifting her legs up on the couch and folding them to her chest. “Just… maybe not today.”

And then his face turned to worry. “Something wrong?”

“No!” she said too loudly. “No, of course not. It’s just one of those days.”

“Oh.” Cloud nodded slowly. “Okay. Well, I gotta get home, then. Gotta head to bed.”

Tifa nodded. “Yeah.”

Cloud stood from the couch and Tifa instantly wanted to pull him back down and take back what she said to make him stay. Her panic got the better of her once he held the knob to the front door and yelled for his name. He turned back around with expectant eyes.

“I…” She wanted to say it. To make him stay for the night like he used to. To bargain that he would not have to sleep on the mattress on her bedroom floor and that he could have the couch. That her parents would not mind it. Just to make him stay. 

Instead, what she blurted out was, “Goodnight, Cloud.”

His face loosened and then he smirked which made her heart skip a beat. “Goodnight, Tifa.”

Cloud locked the door before pulling it shut behind him while she sat in their living room staring at the door. She would see him again tomorrow for sure, but her chance to keep him just for her the way she just did while they spent their time with just the two of them, would have to wait for another week.

But then the week had passed and Cloud had learned to assume that he was no longer welcome to stay the night. He let her know when he was ready to go home, stood up, walked to the door, and bidded her goodnight. She would respond to his call and then watched him leave while she sat there alone, wanting for more of his time. 

This change had become a consistent custom between them every Saturday. And each time he disappeared through the door, she would feel her heart being towed painfully with him. She knew about what love, romance, and crushes meant, but there was a reason why she never talked about them to Cloud even when he was her best friend— because she might already have a crush on him.

Things took for another turn, one day during their senior year at high school, when she first heard of the possibility of prom happening through her gossiping classmates. She instantly thought of Cloud and wearing a purple dress and her favorite lacy flat shoes just so would not end up standing taller than him. She gathered that it would be fun— more than fun. A first time for both of them. Something different. Something more romantic.

It was also that same day, only a few days before their usual weekend habit together, when Cloud unexpectedly showed up at her door. She remembered her mother calling for her name from downstairs and the unusually hesitating look on Cloud’s face as he stood by the door. Once they were alone and had settled in the dining room, Tifa spoke first.

“What’s up?”

Cloud rubbed the back of head, still averting his eyes from her. “It’s… about the… uhm…”

“Yeah?”

He took a deep breath, a fuel to his courage, and gave her a steelier but still unsure look. “Have you heard about the prom?”

Tifa’s breath hitched but she remained relaxed on her seat. “Yeah. Who didn’t.”

Cloud stayed silent, which made Tifa all the more determined to know why he came to her house in the first place.

“What about it?”

“I…” Cloud lowered his head and bit his lip. Even from under the long strands of his hair, she could see the sudden blush on his cheeks from his rounded face peeking. “I want to know if you are already going with someone.”

Tifa pulled her head back, her eyes wide at the suddenness of his question, though it was something she had either been hoping or anticipating from him. She twiddled her fingers on her lap more tightly, a mechanism to ease the nervousness that washed over her, knowing well it could be his way of asking her to join him in the event. There was no other explanation for it.

“Is it really going to happen?” she blurted out instead.

Cloud lifted his eyes. They were back to their usually rounded shapes. The jitters had come back to him, too. “Nothing has been announced about it yet, but if it is really happening…”

“Yes?”

“Well, if you are already going with someone else, then I don’t want you to worry. Jessie from my Chemistry class has asked me,” he said, suddenly hurriedly as if he was attempting to slide the tension off of him. “If you are not going with anyone, then—”

“Wait,” Tifa held up her hand to stop him. “What did you tell her?”

Cloud’s face had frozen to shock. “I… uh…”

Tifa nodded to coax out an answer. “Hm?”

“I told her it’s too early.”  
“To what?”

Cloud shrugged. “Choose partners.”

“What made you think I already have a partner, then?”

His shoulders dropped as he breathed out, “I’m just asking.”

Tifa sighed silently and leaned back on her chair. “Is this why you’re telling me not to worry? Because you’re considering going with Jessie?”

“That’s why I’m asking you first because I wanna go with you.”

Tifa raised her gaze to Cloud. “Then why were you asking me if I already have a partner?”

“I—” Cloud huffed toilsomely. “Because—”

Tifa leaned forward, the chair creaking beneath her, a gesture to challenge. “Am I a back-up?”

“What— No!”

“Then why didn’t you just ask me? Why did you have to bring Jessie up?” She was trying to sound as calm as possible.

Cloud raised his eyes to Tifa, his gaze careful. “You’re pouting.”

Unconsciously, she was. But that was not how she intended to look. “So what?”

“You pout when you’re mad. Are you mad?”

She was. Very.  
“Tifa, please don’t be mad.”

“Who wouldn’t be mad if you are being treated as another choice?” she said. “For you it’s either me or Jessie. Either way, you win. You won’t be alone at the prom, and you will enjoy the night with whomever agrees to go with you.”

“Well, that’s because I thought someone has already asked you!”

“What made you think that, Cloud?!

“Because who wouldn’t?!”

Their voices were raising on each other and Tifa looked away, grinding her teeth together because how could he think that way? She sighed deeply.

“I won’t go with anyone else, you know,” she said, her voice low and soft. “I’ve been waiting for you to ask me.”

Cloud turned away too, lacking the forbearance to meet her eyes, understanding now why she was mad and pouting. He stayed silent.

Tifa stood. She could no longer look at him after saying what she said. It might be a confession if someone was to read at it too much, but she simply told him the truth— that there was no other partner for her to prom but him.

“I gotta go to bed,” she said quietly and headed up the stairs without looking back to give him one last glance. Had she known then that it would be the last conversation they would have in a very, very long time, she should have turned back around and changed things.

But she didn’t.

Instead, she avoided Cloud for far too many times, even when they bumped into each other and Cloud seemed to have something to say, that her mother started asking her why. She did not tell her nor anybody the reasons behind the cold shoulder. She decided it would be for the better for now. But the glacier between them had grown so long and thick that they had stopped talking to each other for months. No more weekend movies, no more barging into each other’s doors, no more peas in a pod. It was just her and it was just him.

And before they knew it, prom was only a few weeks away.

Tifa sat on her bed and stared at her fishbowl full of glass marbles, her supposed lucky charms, the trinkets that were supposed to bring her closer to him. She looked over to the window, not too far from where she could clearly see Cloud’s house. She pressed her lips together when she caught a glimpse of his spiky hair peeking from their window and then it hit her— there were so many things she wanted to tell him. Too many things that the words bloated inside her chest and she would add a padlock on it each day. The swelling had become too much to bear and she was ready to burst. 

She jumped on her feet and sat in front of her desk. She pulled out a paper from her stack, a pen, and an envelope then began writing a letter for Cloud. She wrote and scribbled, setting each word free from the locks until she could feel the tears building up around her eyes. She worked on that letter until dinnertime then she read it, all five pages of it, making sure she included everything she wanted to tell him before she folded them and secured them in the envelope. She would be dropping it on Cloud’s mailbox or his doorstep the next day. 

But she never did. And before she knew it, she had missed her chance, one day when she looked out the window and saw him for the last time, stepping into a cab with his luggage and duffle bag after Mrs. Strife had bidded him a tearful goodbye. She remembered staring with wide eyes, too startled to move or call his name. Until his cab finally sped off she remembered that the letter was still in her drawer.

* * *

“The SOLDIERs are here.”

Tifa heard the whisper from a nearby table and lifted her eyes from her book to the doors of the cafeteria. Muscular men wearing violet uniforms indicating that they were part of Shinra’s most esteemed military organization entered and glanced around, seemingly in search of a vacant table. Behind what looked like their leader, a taller guy with spiky black hair and glinting mako eyes, was a familiar face.

Tifa gasped and froze.

The familiar face spotted her and stopped dead on his tracks. He tapped the black hair’s back and then pointed at her direction. The black-haired SOLDIER grinned and nodded, patting him back and pushing him away. The familiar face chuckled then walked to her table.

The first thought she had when he stood by her was that he had grown taller. He was no longer the scrawny kid she knew him to be, but strong and buffed, just like his fellow SOLDIERs. His face had gotten more angular too, his eyes more piercing, but he kept his boyish smile.

He gestured at her. “Tifa, how have you been?”

Tifa rose to her feet and smiled back, letting out a nervous chuckle. “I’m good. Glad to see you again, Cloud.”

“Glad to see you, too.”

She tucked her hair behind her ear and turned her head to the chair to allow her locks to hide the fluster on her cheeks. She had remembered her as the cute boy next door, but she never expected him to grow this handsome. “Do you wanna sit? Let’s sit.”

It may have been an effect of his training, but her suggestion made Cloud promptly sit on a chair after she did. When Tifa looked back up, she realized he had been staring at her intently with a small smile.

Tifa nodded. “Congratulations on becoming SOLDIER.”

Cloud hummed, his lips curling up on a side. “Thanks. And congratulations on your promotion.”

She narrowed her eyes at him and smiled more widely. “How did you know about that?”

Cloud shrugged. “Been keeping tabs.”

She raised her eyebrows dubiously. “You’ve been keeping tabs on me?”

“Yeah. Since I heard you join Shinra.”

Tifa nodded slowly, blush creeping up her face. “Really? Sounds like I got myself a stalker.”

Cloud chuckled and rubbed the back of his head. How she missed that. “Yeah. Sorry.”

Tifa shook her head. “No need to be.”

Cloud nodded slowly, silently agreeing to whatever she meant, then tipped his head toward her pendant. “You still have that.”

“What?”

“That glass marble.”

“Oh.” Tifa curled her fingers around her pendant. “Yeah. My lucky charm.”

Cloud smirked. “Still on to that?”

Tifa tilted her head and shot him a teasing smile. “Why not? I brought this with me during my interviews for a job here at Shinra. I always got through every time until I finally landed a job here.”

“Wow. I never imagined you wanting to work here.”

Tifa shrugged. “Yeah, well…”

Cloud smiled and reached for his pocket. He pulled out something and showed her a glass marbled resting on his palm. “My amulet.”

Tifa gazed at the marble then shifted her eyes up at Cloud. She smiled. “I remember that.”

Cloud nodded. “It kept me safe during missions, so I guess it’s doing its job. But it’s not working for me all the time.”

Tifa frowned. “Why?”

“Well,” Cloud hung his head. “It… hasn’t helped me with my transfer.”

Tifa’s heart stopped. Was he planning on leaving? “Transfer? Where?”

“To… erm…” Cloud looked at her again, his blue eyes reflecting a shade of tourmaline when they hit light. “To your department.”

Tifa’s eyes widened. “Oh.”

Cloud chuckled nervously. “Oh?”

“I…” Tifa’s grip on her pendant tightened. “I was hoping to transfer to your department and become SOLDIER.”

Cloud’s head recoiled in surprise. “Huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“So… uhm…” This was it, her chance she had already missed once. She pulled up her bag and rummaged through her things before pulling out an envelope, already crumpled and yellowish with the passage of time. She handed it to Cloud, her heart beating faster in her chest. “So I can give you this.”

Cloud blinked at the envelope and gingerly took it. He stared at it before glancing back up at Tifa.

“Don’t— don’t read it here, please,” Tifa stammered. “It’s better that you read it on your own.”

Cloud nodded. “I see.”

Tifa nodded awkwardly. “So… you wanted to transfer to the Research and Development Department?”

“Yeah,” Cloud replied, rubbing the envelope between his fingers. “When I heard that you work there, I… wanted to join you.”

Tifa bit her lip and lowered her gaze. She didn’t have to ask why. It would be a stupid question.

“There were a lot of things I wanted to tell you before I left Nibelheim,” he said.

Tifa chuckled quietly. “Well, maybe you can start by saying sorry.”

Cloud nodded. “Yeah. Sorry I never said goodbye.”

Tifa nodded.

“I can’t count anymore how many times I walked to your door,” he said. Tifa looked up and watched him spill his words and his feelings through his eyes. “I’ve been meaning to knock, to tell you how sorry I was. To tell you I won’t be going to that prom if you’re not coming with me. It’s stupid now that I think about it.”

“Stupid, how?”

“To think that we stopped talking just because of a prom.” He snorted. “It was a stupid reason. It… didn’t matter to me who you went with. Making you happy, that’s the only important thing to me. But then I realized I can’t really enjoy it if I didn’t come with you. And then I screwed up my chance. Big time.”

Tifa tilted her head. “Then why didn’t you ask me again?”

Cloud parted his lips, seemingly struggling to get the right words out. “I… We… I didn’t know if you’d still want to see me.”

Tifa pressed her lips together before opening them again, her words coming out slowly. “I did. I still do.”

Cloud blinked and smiled, the kind that made her heart thump stupidly hard. “So who did you go with?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t. Never made it there. You left too soon.”

Cloud lowered his head again. “Right.”

“But you’re right. It’s stupid to think about it now. It doesn’t matter anymore. It wasn’t even worth it.”

Cloud scoffed, his shoulders slightly bouncing once. “I guess my glass marble isn’t losing its touch yet.”

Another smile grew on her lips. “So does mine.”

“Cloud!” the black-haired guys suddenly called from another table. Cloud looked over his shoulder at him gesturing to come over then tapping his watch on his wrist.

“I guess you gotta go,” Tifa said.

Cloud turned back around at her. “Yeah. Time’s up.”

Tifa nodded. “Maybe a proper goodbye?”

Cloud shook his head. “No. More like I’ll see you soon.”

Tifa giggled. She pulled out a pen and paper then wrote down her number and her email address for safe measure. “Keep in touch with me, will you?”

Cloud took the paper when she handed it to him. “I will.” 

“You’ll come visit me?”

Cloud nodded. “Yeah. For sure. And you’ll write to me?”

Tifa nodded. “Yeah. Definitely.”

They exchanged smiles for one last time before Cloud stood and strode to his comrade’s direction. Tifa held on to her pendant as she watched him walk away and disappear through the cafeteria door. It was the glass marble that started it all, the same one that brought her to him. And now it had worked its own magic and brought him back to her.


End file.
